Tuesday, 19 August 2014

Re: Libav11 for Utopic

On Tue, Aug 19, 2014 at 7:24 PM, Colin Watson <cjwatson@ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 19, 2014 at 08:16:50AM -0400, Reinhard Tartler wrote:
>> This time, Libav11 is source-code compatible to Libav10. While the
>> SONAMEs did change, packages just need to be recompiled and do not
>> require additional patching. Given that we just transitioned to
>> Libav10, I expect this to be rather painless in Ubuntu. I did a mass
>> recompilation in Debian, and it worked out pretty well.
>
> Are you personally going to deal with all of the rebuilds this time, or
> make sure that they're all coordinated? It kind of ended up devolving
> to other people who didn't really know libav to sort it out with the
> libav10 transition, and it held other things up for a long time, so I'd
> like to avoid a repeat of that mess.

I'm totally sorry for the mess the last transition created. I have to
admit that I no longer have the same amount of time available as I
used to have as student, and my new job here in the US doesn't help in
that respect either. I was also surprised by the amount of packages in
the Ubuntu archive that are/were basically abandoned upstream and have
been removed from debian/testing for that reason. I'm convinced that
if we had removed them with a similar aggressiveness from ubuntu, then
the Libav transition could have been finished in two weeks just like
in Debian.

For Libav11, I'd expect things to be much easier, because that weed
out of under-maintained packages has already been done for Libav10.

In terms of this transition, I surely can't promise to push through
the transition completely before August 21th, in particular not when
it's getting tangled with transitions such as Perl. However, I'd be
available for about one or two hours a day to have a look at why
problematic packages won't build and either fix them or at least make
a recommendations on them. So yes, I'll keep a closer eye on this
because am very confident that this will be much easier compared to
any Libav transition before and please subscribe me to any launchpad
bugs that are caused by this transition.

I think the most problematic one would be VLC, but seriously, I'm
pretty sure we'd prefer to have VLC 2.2 for utopic, and I've already
cleaned up that mess in Debian experimental (though because of a
SONAME bump in libvlccore that was detected during the package
preparation, it got cought up in Debian NEW), so doing this in Ubuntu
should be doable with a couple of syncs from Debian.

> (Also note that I'm trying to get Perl 5.20 landed as well, not least
> because it adds multiarch support, although I'm staging that in a PPA so
> hopefully I can manage to keep it reasonably separated.)